SPECTRA features innovative & award-winning poets from across the country with Quad Cities-based poets & writers at Rozz-Tox (2108 3rd Avenue Rock Island, IL), unless otherwise indicated.
***
SPECTRA Lives! Final Event of Spring 2025
4/24 featuring MC Hyland & Elizabeth Clark Wessel
SPECTRA Reading Series Closes Out Season with MC Hyland and Elizabeth Clark Wessel on 4/24
Who: Midwest Writing Center presents the SPECTRA Reading Series
What: MC Hyland and Elizabeth Clark Wessel
When: Thursday, April 24 – 6pm Write-In | 7pm Open Mic | 8pm Reading
Where: Rozz-Tox (2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL)
Cost: free & open | donations welcome | books available for purchase
SPECTRA Lives! The Quad Cities longest-running reading series returns to Rozz-Tox on Thursday, April 24 for its last event of the 2024-25, featuring MC Hyland and Elizabeth Clark Wessel.
Both Hyland and Wessel are on tour in support of new books (Hyland’s The Dead and the Living and the Bridge, and Wessel’s None of It Belongs to Me), the authors will also lead a free community write-in at 6:00 p.m.; there will be short reading, followed by a prompt they developed. Copies of the reading will be available at no cost, and there will be time for participants to write and briefly discuss their work, followed by an open mic at 7:00 p.m. Then at 8:00 p.m., both writers will give a feature reading to close out the evening.
The community write-in starts at 6:00 p.m., open mic at 7:00 p.m. (spaces are limited, 5-minute sets, first come first serve), and the featured readings at 8:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public; books by both authors and by MWC Press will be available for purchase. Donations to MWC are welcome and go to support youth writing programs in the QC.
Please contact Ryan Collins at MWC with questions and media inquiries: ryan.collins@mwcqc.org | 309-732-7330.
Bios:
MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress. She is the author of over a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books and two previous full-length books of poems, THE END (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010), as well as a book of short essays, The Dead and the Living and the Bridge (Meekling Press 2025). Holding MFAs in book arts and creative writing from the University of Alabama and a PhD in English literature from NYU, MC is a teacher, scholar, artist, and freelancer, and lives in St. Paul, MN with her partner, Jeff, and cat, Dakota.
Elizabeth Clark Wessel lives in Stockholm, Sweden and works as a translator of Swedish literature. She was born in rural Nebraska and lived for many years in New York, where she pursued a BA at Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA at Columbia University. In 2010, she co-founded Argos Books, which has been publishing innovative poetry books ever since. She’s the author of four chapbooks of poetry, and her poems have appeared in Fence, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. None of It Belongs to Me (Game Over Books, 2024) is her first full-length collection.
The SPECTRA Reading Series is supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Illinois Arts Council.
The SPECTRA Reading Series is supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Illinois Arts Council.
*** *** *** *** *** ***
We’ll continue to update the 2025 SPECTRA schedule soon! Please check back and join the SPECTRA Facebook group for updates on our events and other readings, workshops, etc. from all over the country!